Court Leaves Public Out Of Earshot

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April 3, 2005|By Manning Pynn, Public Editor

Deep inside the A section Tuesday, an article explained that the United States Supreme Court had refused to protect a newspaper from being sued for reporting the lies that one politician told about another.

The article by David G. Savage, who covers the Supreme Court for the Los Angeles Times, dealt with a contentious meeting of the Parkersburg Borough Council in Pennsylvania in 1995. The session broke up after three minutes, and Tom Kennedy of the Chester County Daily Local reported that council member William T. Glenn Sr. issued a statement outside the chambers strongly implying that he considered the mayor and the council president to be "queers and child molesters."

Those two men sued, each collecting $17,500 from Glenn for that comment, but they thought they were owed more. They also sued the newspaper for reporting it.

Anyone who has observed an election campaign knows that politicians say harsh things about one another all the time. Should journalists have to determine if a public figure is telling the truth before reporting what he has to say?

If news organizations had to accept responsibility for every lie a politician told, newspapers would be a lot thinner, and the 6 p.m. news would end at 6:15. That may seem, at first blush, like a good thing, but voters generally -- and rightly -- want to know more about elected representatives than the careful statements they utter in official settings.

Sometimes statements made outside those formal meetings reveal much more -- about the character of the person making them as well as about those the comments concern.

The Daily Local argued that it was shielded in the Glenn case by something implicit in the Constitution's First Amendment called a "neutral reportage privilege," which basically would let it publish an accurate and impartial account of a public official's comments.

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court, though, disagreed, finding that the First Amendment contains no such protection. The U.S. Supreme Court decided Monday to let that ruling stand.

Because the high court didn't hear the case, itself, that action set no legal precedent, but it seemed to leave news organizations vulnerable when they publish unpleasant things one public official says about another. Comments reported accurately and without taking sides still can be published without fear -- as long as they were made in an official proceeding .

It's when politicians step outside their meetings and start hurling epithets, as William Glenn did, that things get a lot less certain.

The public ought to be able to know what their representatives are saying -- true or not -- but journalists may have misgivings if telling the truth about what may be a lie puts them into jeopardy.

To win in court, offended public figures would have to prove that a news organization either knew when it published the comments that they weren't true or that it recklessly disregarded the likelihood that they weren't true. That second part, though, can be a judgment call -- and could pose a risk journalists might be unwilling to take.

The losers, if that happens, will be people who depend on the news media to stay within earshot of what their representatives are saying.